This year, each of our eleven TDC competition judges chose their favorite from all the entries. These Judges’ Choice selections will be highlighted in the Type Directors Club annual, The World’s Best Typography – Typography 39, which will be published later this year.

The award-winning work is on display in in New York at The Cooper Union through August 10, and will be shown in Antwerp, Belgium as part of the ATypI conference, September 12 – 15.

As a preview, we want to tell you more about the posters created by Burrow, Berlin for an exhibition on movement, which features work by Francisco Regalado and Benjamin Skop. This set of posters is one of seven communications designs that received the Judges’ Choice badge. Read why communications design judge Mike Essl chose this poster series from Berlin.

Poster by Burrow for the first in a series of exhibitions in its space, On Movement.

This is a series of silkscreen-printed announcement posters for Francisco Regalado and Benjamin Skop’s exhibition On Movement No.1, held at Burrow, an interdisciplinary design studio based in Berlin. For the first exhibition in the series, the Regalado and Skop presented their interpretations of the deconstruction of movement.

(De)construction of the word movement is visualized through constantly shifting and tilting the silk screen while printing different layers on paper. Thus, the actual process of printing a poster becomes the main design element.

The poster designers worked with four different rotation angles, two screens, and four print runs each, generating a total of four poster variations. The blue information layer remains static while the customized black type is placed to overlap the previous layer systematically, creating the illusion of moving sideways.

“This poster made me stop and laugh. Not because it’s particularly funny, but because it’s incredibly clever.

There is a beautiful concreteness in using the movement of the press to promote a show about movement. This simple idea is delivered so efficiently and effectively that the viewer learns simultaneously about the subject matter of the exhibition and the process by which the poster was made. It’s a deceptively simple marriage of form and content that rewards a closer look.

I wish I had thought of it.”

Portrait: Mike Essl.

About Mike Essl

Mike Essl is a graphic designer, educator, and Mr. T memorabilia collector. With over twenty years in the field, Essl’s bold approach has earned him equal acclaim for his elevation of comic books with DC Comics and Rizzoli as for websites with Wikipedia and San Francisco Opera. At The Chopping Block (co-founded 1996) and on his own, Essl-led projects have been featured by the AIGA, ComicCon, the Cooper Hewitt, and MoMA.

Essl’s illustrations have been included in The New York Times, New York Magazine, and the Yale University Art Gallery. His outspoken commentary has been featured on Design Matters with Debbie Millman, The Howard Stern Show, and VH1’s Totally Obsessed. Essl is presently the Acting Dean of the Cooper Union School of Art, where he has been an Associate Professor of graphic design since 2002.

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The Type Directors Club is the leading international organization whose purpose is to support excellence in typography, both in print and on screen. Through our annual competition and exhibition and frequent salons and workshops, we hope to celebrate the current stars of the typographic field and educate its future leaders. Learn more about the club here or become a member to help us give back to the community and to become a part of our history.